Helen Garner (b. 1942), author and journalist, is one of Australia's best-known writers. Garner was a secondary school teacher before the publication of her first novel, the semi-autobiographical Monkey Grip (1977). Widely praised and winner of a National Book Council Award, it was made into a feature film released in 1982. A double novella, Honour and Other People's Children (1980), a volume of short stories, Postcards from Surfers (1985) – which won the NSW Premier's Literary Award – and the novels The Children's Bach (1984), Cosmo Cosmolino (1992), and the collection The Feel of Steel (2001) followed. Garner's fiction has strong moral themes, and since the 1990s she has pursued a variety of profound ethical questions in journal articles and non-fiction books. In 1993 she won a Walkley Award for her Time magazine article about Daniel Valerio, a two-year-old who died of systematic abuse inflicted by his mother's boyfriend. Two years later her book The First Stone, exploring claims of sexual harassment at Melbourne University's Ormond College, caused a national sensation. True Stories (1997), a collection of non-fiction pieces, won the Nita B Kibble Award for women's life writing. Her rumination on the murder of a Canberra student, Joe Cinque's Consolation, was published in 2004 and made into a film in 2016. Since 2005 Garner has written occasional pieces for The Monthly, sometimes delightedly describing her life with her grandchildren. Her other books include The Spare Room (2008), This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial (2014) and the collection Everywhere I Look (2016).
